The Dead and Empty World Read online

  They start to run, the man half-carrying Iza as they slip through the mud, the rain a blanket of water covering the world. Iza has so much blood on her from the broken window and the fall that even in the rain the lihémorto scents her and begins to chase, ripping free of the curtain, its moan grating through the darkness.

  When they hit the edge of the cliff, Iza doesn’t even hesitate. She just jumps, using everything left in her body to propel her as far away from the limestone wall as she can. The man’s hand still grips hers, but as they fall, his hold falters and his fingers slip through her own.

  In that moment, while Iza hangs suspended in the air, nothing hurts. Nothing shatters the stillness of the night, the cradling gentleness of the rain-soaked air.

  And then she hits the waves, bubbles careening around her as the salt invades every scrape and cut. Iza claws at the water, scrabbling for the surface. The man finds her arm and yanks, pulling her up until she can breathe again. She kicks her feet to stay afloat and watches the water froth and churn closer to the cliff, where the lihémorto hit.

  “My father,” Iza says , still trying to catch her breath. “He has ships. Just around in the next cove.” She points to the south, but the man shakes his head.

  “We can make it,” she tells him. “We’ll be safe.” She coughs as a wave slaps water into her face. “My father was prepared for this.”

  The man grabs Iza’s arm, pulling it back into the water. “Your father’s boats are gone,” he says. She can barely hear anything beyond the sound of the rain slapping the ocean’s surface like a hundred million children clapping at once.

  Iza doesn’t even know how to form the question, but she doesn’t have to. “The breach wasn’t an accident, Iza. All of this was planned from the beginning. Even saving you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Iza says. The world around them hushes in that moment, a gap in the rain. And that’s when Iza hears the moans, but not from the direction of the cliffs. She looks back into the darkness beyond the breaking waves and in a flash of lightning sees the pirate ship. Its tarps have been pulled back, and the writhing mass of mudo strapped to the hull surge at the night.

  BEFORE

  Iza’s mother wasn’t built for the heat, even though she’d been born and raised in Curaçao, and she certainly wasn’t raised to serve as a dictator’s wife. She missed the snow, the university where she worked, and Starbucks coffee. She missed turning on the boiler in the winter and building a wood -fueled fire. She missed traffic and NPR and the buzz of Internet gossip.

  In the beginning she told Iza to be grateful they were alive. Iza knew her mother tried not to think about all the friends she’d left behind, or wonder if they’d survived the Return. She tried especially hard not to think about them being undead. But at night, when her mother lay in bed and her father met with captains and the homber mata, Iza knew her mother thought about her ex-boyfriends and wondered if they’d died and come back.

  Iza’s mother joked with her husband that if only the Internet were working reliably, she’d be able to log onto Facebook or Twitter, and she was sure they’d have added a “Check here if zombie” box so she could catch up on the status of her friends.

  Iza noticed her father never laughed when she wanted him to.

  But both Iza and her mother knew that they were alive because of Iza’s father. And everyone on the island also knew this. They knew that it was because of him they were surviving, and they treated him with deference, respect, and awe, until he came to expect it, even from his family, who’d known him from the before time. Who could remember what he looked like sheepishly rumpled and unshaven on a long weekend morning.

  After a while, after the fences were set up around the beaches and port, and the homber mata secured the coastline, it became rare for people to die and Return.

  Iza’s father began to think that maybe he’d established one of the few pockets of sustainability in the world and that they could outlast the Return. He began to think that maybe Iza could be raised with a normal life. But her mother despaired even more. Because she couldn’t stand a life that was close to normal. It only reminded her of what she’d lost.

  That’s when the ships began to arrive. Desperate, limping, starving, and often rife with infection, these huge floating cities would throw themselves upon Curaçao’s shores. Men, women, and children would jump from the rails and swim for the cliffs, climbing old ladders, and huddling on tattered docks.

  Everyone on the island, including Iza, could hear their screams for mercy. For help and water and food and shelter and life—everything that Iza had without a second thought.

  Iza’s father was ruthless. He knew that in order to survive, they had to keep the population of the island in check, and they had to be militant about keeping the infection from breaching the border. He set up patrols. He sent shiny white speedboats loaded with armed men to buzz around the island. Iza always thought of them as albino bees guarding an angry nest. Her afternoons were filled with the lazy drone of motorboats in the distance, puckered with snaps and pops as the homber mata killed the infected or anyone else not willing to follow her father’s rules.

  Before long Iza’s mother would stand at the edge of the cliffs and watch the homber mata. In her hands she’d hold branches of bougainvillea, and one by one she’d pluck their petals and drop them to the water. Some days the waves at the base of the cliff would blaze red with their bright blossoms, and other days with the blood of people who’d been seeking any chance to survive.

  Iza’s father would remind them that this is what it took to survive, but Iza could tell, looking into her mother’s eyes, that this was no way to live.

  Iza sometimes wondered if her father’s need for order and utmost loyalty had killed her mother. If somehow her mother had fallen outside her father’s tightly ordered rules and that was what had led to her infection. If she’d actually been infected.

  NOW

  Tacked to the limestone cliff is a small battered sign that reads THE BLUE ROOM in a black scrawl with a jagged red arrow pointing down into the water, the sole reminder of the old tourist site, now abandoned. Only in the lowest of tides does the mouth of the cave breach the surface of the water. Tonight the tide is high, and Iza and her savior have to heave in a deep breath and search against the cliff for the opening.

  Iza’s fingers brush the jagged edges of the limestone as she swims into the darkness. She kicks as hard as she can, her lungs beginning to buck. She purses her lips tight, her chest burning as her body chants, Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!

  Her shoulder scrapes against the top of the tunnel leading into the cave, and she pushes at the wall until finally she feels her ears pop and her fingers touch air. The young man helps pull her onto a large flat rock in the middle of the cave.

  On a bright day the sun dances through the water, throwing the entire room the most brilliant shade of blue Iza’s ever seen, brighter than the bluest parrot fish in the reef. Now, as the storm begins to clear off, every now and then moonlight bubbles through.

  Iza pushes herself to her feet and reaches out a hand until she can touch the wall to steady herself. The light bouncing through the water seems to make the entire cave dance and twirl and spin, and it makes her feel off balance.

  She stares at the man, who just stands there. He glances at Iza’s body, and then sharply away into the darkness. Iza looks down and realizes what he must have seen—her thin white nightgown almost transparent, the richness of her skin shining through it. With each breath it pulls tight against her.

  For a heartbeat she wonders what it would have been like for them before the Return. If this had been some other night so many years ago and they’d both ended up in a hidden cave of blue light. Iza wonders how many lovers have rendezvoused here in the reflection of waves.

  She tries to pluck the fabric away from her body, but it gets tangled in her belt, and so she unbuckles it, holding the machete in her hand. She has no idea what happened to her gun.

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sp; Iza crosses her arms over her chest. “The pirates,” she finally says. Her voice sounds dull in the cave, and she shakes her head to dislodge the water from her ears. “You told me you escaped from them.”

  “I told you I jumped from their boat in the night and swam to the island. That was true,” he says.

  She curls her hands into fists, clenching the machete tighter. “You’re one of them.”

  “No,” he says. “I am them. The ship is my ship. The men are my men. I have made all this happen.”

  “Why?” Iza can barely even whisper the word.

  “Your father is a ruthless man,” the pirate says. “And this isla is too valuable.”

  “My father is fair—,” Iza tells him, always his greatest defender.

  “He uses his power to control people!” The pirate cuts Iza off, shouting so that his words echo around her.

  “You have to be ruthless to survive,” Iza says, her voice low. It’s her father’s mantra.

  “If that’s true, then why do you blame me for attacking? For being just as ruthless?”

  Iza opens her mouth, and then closes it. “There were innocent people,” she finally says. “You’re going to end up killing the entire island.”

  “No, I’m not,” the pirate says. “My men won’t let the infection spread past the landhuizen. In a few days they’ll kill the lihémorto, and Curaçao will return to normal.”

  “My father will never allow it.”

  “Your father will be dead!” the pirate yells, his breath hot against Iza’s face like a slap. She stumbles under the weight of it. He seems to regret the words as soon as they leave his mouth, and he reaches for her hand, wrapping his fingers around her.

  “I am not like your father,” he says, stepping closer to her. “You have to understand,” he continues. “I don’t like this. I don’t want this. I want the world to go back to the way it was before. I want it to be fair. That’s all I’m trying to do is make it fair again.”

  Iza thinks about her mother tossing bougainvillea petals into the waves. All she wanted was for life to go back to the way it was before the Return, and Iza realizes that’s what she’s been waiting for as well.

  And it’s never going to happen.

  “My father’s men are loyal to him. The homber mata won’t follow you. They’ll avenge his death,” Iza growls, ripping her hand free and pushing back against the cave wall.

  “The homber mata will follow your father’s heir,” the pirate says, stepping forward. “They will follow you. And you will follow me. And in return I will keep you safe.”

  The pirate takes another step forward. He brushes his fingers against her chin. Iza feels his chest against hers. “Mi bunita,” he whispers.

  Iza’s toes curl against the ragged edges of the rock. The water in the cave pulses like a dull heartbeat— in and out, in and out. She thinks about all the old romance novels she’s read. All the times the pirate rescued the damsel in distress and she learned to love him for it.

  “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to make you my own,” he says, twining his hand in her hair and pulling her head back. Prickles of pain itch against her scalp. Her throat feels awkward and bare.

  Iza tries her best to pull away from his kiss. “How long?” she asks. “How do you know me?”

  The pirate grins. He leans toward her, the heat of his mouth barely brushing Iza’s forehead, her temple, her ear. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  BEFORE

  “Look,” her father said. He took Iza’s smaller hand in his and gently pushed her fingertips into the warm salty water. They were at an aquarium, standing with the other tourists around a low shallow tank filled with starfish and anemone and sea urchins.

  He’d taken the day off just to spend it with her, to point out all the different types of fish weaving through the large exhibits. Together they’d sat in a huge amphitheater and watched a whale shark lumber around the graceful eagle rays.

  Iza spent hours with her eyes wide open, leaning into the pipe-tobacco warmth of her father and listening to him explain how to tell a nurse shark from a hammerhead and a grouper from a jack.

  But now that she was close enough to touch the creatures, she wanted to pull her hand back. She was too afraid of the spines and prickles of the sea urchins that looked as sharp as needles.

  “It’s okay,” her father said, a laughing rumble to his voice she could feel in her chest. “Trust me.”

  Iza tasted the salt in the back of her throat, but whether it was from her tears or the open tanks she didn’t know. She sniffed and pressed her lips together, holding her breath as she let her father brush her hand over the different creatures.

  She jumped when she felt the sea urchin, expecting the sharp pinch of pain and not the soft bristle instead. Iza turned her head up to him then. He was smiling at her, and she knew he was proud of her bravery and strength.

  She understood then that she wanted to be that little girl in his eyes forever. She would do anything for that feeling again, and she’d spent years chasing after it since.

  NOW

  “The game,” Iza whispers. “Risk. It was yours.”

  The pirate’s smile grows even larger. “Strategy,” he says. “That’s how I learned it. Your father should’ve paid attention.”

  Iza should have remembered his eyes, but the pirate was so skinny then. So young and full of rage that he hides so well now.

  It becomes so clear to Iza how everything is her fault. Her knees go weak, so that the pirate has to loosen his grip on her hair in order to hold her body up. She pushes her fingers to her lips, tasting the dusky saltiness she’d tasted when the old woman had fallen off the dock because of her.

  Her father always said Iza needed to be ruthless, but she hadn’t believed him. She’d thought that the world could be something more. And she’d been the one to give the pirate access to the landhuizen. She’d had a knife at his throat and let him live. All because Iza wanted to believe that her father was wrong.

  The pirate wraps his hand around Iza’s wrist, and she glances down at where his dark fingers splay over her pulse. In her head all she can see is Beihito. At the way he looked at her when they fell, as if she were nothing to him. As if he’d never loved her as djé yiu muhé —his daughter.

  She looks up at the pirate. He’s wiped out the only man who’d ever found something inside Iza worthy of love.

  Iza reaches one hand up and places it behind the pirate’s head. His skin feels like the summer sun, damp with sweat and rough like a tribon’s body. “And my father’s men will follow you because of me?” she asks. Her mouth hovers just against his. “And you’ll protect me?”

  He mumbles a yes as she presses her lips to his. Just this once Iza wants to know what it tastes like, this idea that the world can be beautiful and different.

  She thinks about the old Risk board, about how the Venezuelan marked an X where Curaçao would have been. She remembers how she would put her thumb over it, wiping out her world. She wonders at how easy it is to erase everything you’ve ever known. Everything you’ve ever thought you were or wanted to be or should be.

  As the pirate lets himself go against Iza, as he breathes her in, she pulls Beihito’s machete up and presses it against his neck. Iza digs the blade in deep like she should have done before.

  “Then they’ll follow me,” she says as the pirate clutches a hand to his throat, falling backward into the moon-drenched water. “And I’ll protect myself.”

  Iza watches his body sink through the waves, his blood like bougainvillea blossoms blooming on the surface. She could do what it takes to survive. She could do what’s necessary to rule her father’s island.

  Iza could be ruthless. Just like her father.

  • ♦ •

  A GAME OF FIRSTS

  Introduction

  One night, my husband and I were driving home from dinner when we came upon a man stumbling down the middle of a street in our neighborhood. There was nothing p
articularly scary about him, he just appeared to be drunk but otherwise fine, so we carefully made our way around him and continued to our house a few blocks away.

  We joked about how the way he’d been staggering along made him look like a zombie and it wasn’t until we’d pulled into the driveway that one of us pointed out, “You know, that’s why we’d be screwed in an actual zombie apocalypse. Because we’d see the first zombie, just assume he was drunk, and by the time we figured it out, we’d be too late.”

  Which is exactly what happens to Julie and Danny in “A Game of Firsts.”

  This story originally appeared in the anthology, “The First Time,” which is a collection of short stories all written by 2009 Debutantes – authors whose young adult books debuted in 2009. Unsurprisingly, the theme was “firsts,” which I think can be especially poignant when facing the end of the world (or at least the end of the world as you’ve known it).

  • ♦ •

  We could’ve left the city—there was probably still time after we saw the first one. The problem was, we didn’t realize it was the first one, not really. We’d been driving home after a late night out and there’d been this guy wandering down the middle of the road, stumbling like he was drunk.

  “How funny would it be if that dude was a zombie?” my brother Danny had said as we swerved around him, honking.

  We laughed.

  Once home, Danny nipped us each a shot of Tequila from our parents’ liquor cabinet. They were out of town for the weekend and we were taking advantage of it – breaking rules like staying out past curfew and watching loud movies late into the night. When we finally fell into our separate beds we left our alarm clocks untouched, intending to sleep late into Sunday morning.

  By then, of course, it was mayhem. Already there were accidents on both of the interstates out of town, the back roads clogged so thick that people just left their cars where they idled, hoping to make it farther on foot.